The Past Lives of Children

More of this Feature • Page 2: More past lives stories    Join the Discussion "To me, reincarnation is absolutely normal. All of us have uncountable past lives. Some of these past lives may be as humans, some as animals, some as petas (so called ghosts) and some as devas (so-called angels & gods). There are many realms of existence where a person can be reborn in, including hell. But existence in any of these realms is not permanent. Whether you are reborn as a hell being, an animal, a human, or a deva, you will die one day." Read the rest of this discussion and respond     Related Resources • The Mystery of Past Life Recall • Many More Past Lives Recalled • Deathbed Visions    Elsewhere on the Web • Children's Past Lives

Have you lived before? Over 60 percent of the world's population believes in some form of reincarnation, according to Dr. J. Chiappalone in his book Keys to Reality. "From the logical point of view," he writes, "when contemplating our existence from the metaphysical and philosophical aspect, [the] single life theory does not make much sense. The hit or miss theory of only one life in order to attain a heavenly goal appears absurd, when one views the varying conditions of particular lives."

There is no way to empirically prove reincarnation, however. What evidence we have comes from the testimony of people who claim to recall - sometimes vividly - people, places, things and events from what they believe could be their past lives. The skeptical viewpoint is that these recollections are little more than flights of fantasy and wishful thinking.

More difficult to dismiss, perhaps, are such recollections from small children who, without prompting, describe their memories of former lives. "Some as young as two and still in diapers blurt out, 'I remember when I died before' or 'My other mommy had curly hair,'" says the website Children's Past Lives, based on the book by Carol Bowman. "They often describe details that they had no way of learning in this life." Dr. Ian Stevenson, one of the foremost researchers into the past lives of children and author of Children Who Remember Previous Lives, has documented over a 40-year period more than 2,600 cases that he says offer "undeniable evidence" for the truth of these memories.

In a recently published book about Stevenson's work, Old Souls - Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives, author Thomas Shroder writes: "These children supply names of towns and relatives, occupations and relationships, attitudes and emotions that, in hundreds of cases around the world, are unique to a single dead individual, often apparently unknown to their present families. But the fact is, the people the children remember did exist, the memories that the children claim can be checked against real lives and their alleged feats of identification verified - or contradicted - by a variety of witnesses."

Here are some of those anecdotes from Stevenson's research and other sources:

Civil War Soldier
Carol Bowman was inspired to write Children's Past Lives by the vivid recollections of her own children. When investigating with a therapist why her five-year-old son Chase was frightened by certain loud noises, the small boy described events that obviously did not occur in this life. "I'm standing behind a rock. I'm carrying a long gun with a kind of sword at the end. I have dirty, ripped clothes, brown boots, a belt. I'm hiding behind a rock, crouching on my knees and shooting at the enemy. I'm at the edge of a valley. The battle is going on all around me. I don't want to look, but I have to when I shoot. Smoke and flashes everywhere. And loud noises: yelling, screaming, loud booms. I'm not sure who I'm shooting at - there's so much smoke, so much going on. I'm scared. I shoot at anything that moves. I really don't want to be here and shoot other people."

Tell-Tale Birthmarks
Dr. Stevenson's research has often turned up verified correlations between birthmarks and traumatic events in the past lives of his young subjects:

• An Indian boy with an array of birthmarks on his chest recalled being killed by a shotgun blast to the chest.
• Another boy in India remembers a past life in which some of his fingers were cut off by a fodder-chopping machine. This boy was born with mere stumps for fingers.

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